Harold Ancart

A lot of people focus on what they can control and forget about what they cannot control, but I say, let’s do the opposite.
—Harold Ancart

Harold Ancart’s paintings, sculptures, and installations explore our experience of natural landscapes and built environments. Alluding to a range of art historical sources and often characterized by abstract passages of color, they are sometimes arranged into multipart tableaux.

Ancart was born in Brussels in 1980. After starting out studying political science, he changed paths and graduated with an MFA from École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre, Brussels, in 2007. He now lives and works in New York. As a child, he was a fan of comic books and manga, and was inspired by Belgian pioneers Hergé, creator of Tintin, and Peyo, originator of the Smurfs. He later discovered others in the field such as Katsuhiro Otomo and Frank Miller, and to artists including Frank Auerbach, James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka, and Léon Spilliaert. A 2014 road trip across the United States was a critical energizing event for Ancart, and a 2016 exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston of the drawings he produced in his mobile studio during the journey marked a turning point in his career.

Despite having been raised and educated in Belgium, Ancart developed a practice rooted in the history of American painting and abstraction, showing the influence of such artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Brice Marden, and Wayne Thiebaud. Focusing on recognizable subjects, he isolates moments of poetry in everyday surroundings. Working serially, he moves beyond simple representation to emphasize the process of painting. And, straddling abstraction and representation, he experiments with color and composition, allowing the operation of chance to help determine a work’s final form.